There’s a fine line that has to be walked when writing about something you’re already working on. Several studies have shown that talking about a goal, tends to release much the same rush as actually completing the goal, making you less likely to slog through the work in the middle. Nonetheless, I feel I really do need to post here to talk through some stuff.

So, officers began as a more general mental question about representing the importance of mid-level officers in an army. After hashing some stuff out I came to the conclusion that simply hiding the main army behind the officers and only allowing the player to interact at the officer level would best accomplish this. So I went out and built a little one click toy that made officers fight each other in a very abstract mathematical way.

While I was doing that I realized that it was built with an assumption of symmetry, that one officer would fight one enemy, etc… The toy didn’t have any way of handling asymmetrical armies. This got me thinking about what I really wanted out of this game, was I content to be a pure strategy game, or would there need to be tactical simulations? If there were tactical simulations would I really want the player to be in control? So I went out and read, a few different sites, looking for some inspiration on the issue. What was really important? Could Strategy be worked apart from tactics, and if it could, would that still communicate the main idea, the importance of officers in making things work on the ground? Well, I happened upon wikipedia’s page describing the double-envelopment, and it became rather clear to me, I needed a tactical simulation. However, just giving full control to the player is also out of the question, there is no point if the officers just become the unit the player moves instead of the traditional unit.

Haven’t started the tactical coding yet, still haven’t got all the details worked out yet, but I’m confident I’m going in that direction…

Anyways, I finished another toy representing castles which are going to be managed by the player. That’s helped me firm up some thoughts I’d been playing around with on that end as well. I guess that’s really all I have to say for now.